Muhammad Ali Pasha Biography

Often referred to as the founder of modern Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha
(c. 1769–1849) was an Ottoman Turkish military leader who ruled
Egypt for much of his adult life, amassing such military power that he
was able to threaten the rule of the Ottoman Sultan himself.

The reforms undertaken by Muhammad Ali as he centralized his power brought
the foundations of modern statehood to Egypt. He put in place a vast
military and economic apparatus financed by efficient tax collections, and
his armies of drafted conscripts vanquished and then permanently replaced
the feuding warlord groups that had ruled much of the Middle East.
Muhammad Ali modernized education, ordering the translation of European
books on a large scale, vaccinated children against smallpox and offered
them medical care, conducted censuses, and undertook huge public works
projects that established cotton as a key Egyptian cash crop, which it
remains today. Early in his career he curbed the spread of the
fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam from the Arabian Peninsula.

Worked as Tobacco Dealer

Muhammad Ali was born around 1769 in Kavala, a seaport town in the
Macedonian region and now part of Greece; the surname Pasha, a designation
of high noble rank in the Ottoman Turkish empire, was given to him after
he assumed Egyptian rule. After this point he would have been referred to
as the Pasha; the Turkish form of his name, used by Ottoman ruling elites,
was Mehmet Ali Pasa. He was probably an ethnic Albanian; his father,
Ibrahim Agha, was a local Ottoman military commander. After his
father's death, Muhammad Ali was raised by the local governor and
married to one of the governor's relatives, the mother of the first
five of what were said to be an eventual total of 95
children he sired. As a young man he worked as a tobacco dealer, a factor
that may have influenced his later focus on agricultural trade.

It was military service that put Muhammad Ali on the path to his political
career, and it was Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798
that initially set that career in motion. Napoleon's forces easily
defeated those of the ruling Mamluks, a hereditary military caste
originally composed of slave converts to Islam. At the time, Egypt was a
partly autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, with ultimate control
residing with the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul).
Napoleon's troops in turn were driven out of Egypt by British
forces in 1801, but the result was a power vacuum, with the Mamluks, the
Sultan's forces, a contingent of feared Albanian troops under
Muhammad Ali's command, and various local powers all contending for
control. Muhammad Ali managed to align himself with local merchants and
Islamic clerics, and in 1805 the Sultan Selim III named him
wali
, or viceroy, of Egypt.

He faced a series of obstacles in consolidating his power in such a
chaotic situation. In the words of Khaled Fahmy, writing in
The Cambridge History of Egypt
, "Egypt's history in the first half of the 19th century was
considerably shaped by [Muhammad Ali's] attempt to make his tenure
more secure and permanent." He was threatened by the Mamluks, the
expansionist British, village leaders and warlords from other parts of
Egypt (he essentially controlled only Cairo at this point), and not least
by the Sultan himself, who was leery of giving any of his subjects too
much power. The first challenge came when the Sultan ordered the
wali
of Salonika to go to Cairo and change places with Muhammad Ali, but that
ruler backed off from the plan in the face of Muhammad Ali's strong
local support.

The British at the time supported the Mamluks as a counterweight to the
power of the Ottoman Sultan, and they had interests of their own in
opening up secure transportation routes to their colonies in India. In
1807 the British attacked Alexandria and Rosetta, but were repelled by the
Pasha's force of 5,000 crack Albanian troops even as earlier
fighters from the Islamic world had quickly capitulated to European
forces. The most brutal chapter in Muhammad Ali's consolidation of
power came in 1811, when he invited a large contingent of Mamluk fighters
to participate in a large military parade. Bringing up the rear, the
Mamluks entered a narrow passage leading out onto the large Roumaliya
Square, whose entrances were controlled by gates. As the Mamluks bunched
up in the passage, the Pasha's forces closed the gate in front of
them and opened fire from the walls above. The result was a massacre that
put an end to the period of Mamluk influence in Egypt.

Checked Wahhabi Expansion

The parade to which the Mamluks had been invited celebrated the dispatch
of the Pasha's troops, under his son Tusun Pasha, to recapture the
Hijaz, the region of the Arabian peninsula that contains the spiritually
important cities of Mecca and Medina, from forces loyal to the philosophy
of eighteenth-century Islamic leader Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the
Wahhabi sect whose ideas still determine many aspects of life in Saudi
Arabia today. The Pasha's campaign was inconclusive, but Mecca and
Medina were captured and brought once again under the rule of the new
Sultan, Mahmud II. The Pasha dispatched an emissary to the Sultan bearing
the keys to both cities, but the Sultan's response was to urge the
emissary, Latif Agha, to mount a coup against the Pasha. Mohammed Ali
learned of the plot and had his deputy, Muhammad Lazughlu, seize Latif
Agha and have him beheaded.

Influenced by the military drills and clear chain of command he had
witnessed among European forces, the Pasha set about training his Albanian
troops in accordance with a
nizam al-jadid
, or new order. This effort resulted in an assassination attempt, which
the Pasha foiled. Gradually, however, Muhammad Ali regularized
Egypt's army and began to enlarge it by drafting peasants from
Egypt's outlying districts. He employed a French officer, a Colonel
Sève, to train the new recruits, giving him the Ottoman name of
Suleyman Pasha. The initial result of Muhammad Ali's growing
military power was that Sultan Mahmud II attempted to blunt it by sending
forces commanded by the Pasha's son Ibrahim Pasha to battle
fighters struggling for Greece's independence from the Ottoman
Empire. As the Pasha himself had foreseen, the campaign was unsuccessful,
and the modern nation of Greece was the result. The Pasha increasingly
began to regard the Ottoman central government with suspicion.

The chief aim of the Pasha's modernization schemes was always to
finance his growing military (by the 1830s it numbered some 130,000
troops) by increasing tax revenues, for which he devised an efficient
collection bureaucracy. Whatever their aim, his infrastructure projects
were ambitious and far-reaching, if brutal. His most impressive
accomplishment was the rebuilding of an ancient canal that linked
Alexandria with the Nile River, an effort that reportedly cost the lives
of some 100,000 of the Egyptian peasants who were ordered to do the
digging. Under the Pasha's reign, the total length of
Egypt's irrigation channels more than doubled, and the amount of
land under cultivation between 1813 and 1830 increased by about 18
percent. Also costly in human terms was a military campaign in Sudan in
the early 1820s, intended to swell the ranks of Egyptian slaves; only
3,000 of 20,000 Sudanese survived a forced march from their homeland to
the Egyptian city of Aswan.

One effect of these developments was an increase in Egyptian cotton
exports to Europe's hungry markets, with the Pasha and his
relatives, whom he installed in key administrative posts, profiting at
each checkpoint. Another form of foreign exchange was tourism, with
members of the European nobility flocking to Egypt to experience its rich
heritage of treasures from the ancient world. The Pasha replaced
Egypt's patchwork of village, tribal, and religious governments
with a modern set of administrative divisions modeled on those of European
countries. And, anxious to ensure a steady supply of new military
draftees, he established new hospitals and took the advice of European
doctors regarding the efficacy of the new smallpox vaccine, invented by
Edward Jenner in Britain in 1796.

Invaded Syria

The 1830s marked the apex of Muhammad Ali's expansionist ambitions.
After initial consideration of a thrust westward toward Tripoli, he
launched an invasion of Syria in 1831, using the excuse that he was only
trying to arrest a group of 6,000 Egyptian draft dodgers. A force of
30,000 fighters under his son Ibrahim Pasha captured the city of Acre (now
in northern Israel) after a siege lasting six months, overran the rest of
Syria, and then moved forward into the Anatolia region of present-day
Turkey in 1832. In a battle on the Anatolian plains north of Konya,
Turkey, the Pasha's forces defeated Ottoman troops under Grand
Vizier Muhammad Rashid Pasha, leaving them with an open road to
Constantinople and the imperial palaces.

Although Ibrahim Pasha urged his father to declare Egypt's
independence from the empire, Muhammad Ali, who was culturally,
linguistically, and administratively Ottoman, hesitated. The Turkish
Sultan took advantage of this window of opportunity to ask for help from
the European powers; turned down by British foreign minister Lord
Palmerston, he persuaded a Russian navy to come to his aid. The result was
1833's Peace of Kutahia, which recognized Muhammad Ali's
legitimacy as
wali
of Egypt, the Hijaz, and Crete, and granted Ibrahim Pasha the same status
in several Syrian territories. The Pasha's tax-collecting
prerogatives were also expanded.

That did not prevent a decline in Egypt's financial fortunes in the
1830s, however, as the Pasha's enormous administrative and military
reach showed signs of over-extension. The Pasha proposed a giant Nile
River flood control project, to be built of stones from the Pyramids; it
was initially abandoned but was later completed in 1861. Disaffection rose
in Egypt due to high taxes and punishing military conscription rates among
the young, but a second glorious campaign once again showed Ibrahim
Pasha's military skills, as Egyptian forces defeated those of the
ailing Mahmud II at the Battle of Nezib, near Urfa in southeast Turkey, in
1839. Once again the Pasha seemed on the brink of regional rule, and once
again he hesitated. This time it was British intervention that saved the
new 16-year-old Sultan, Abid-ul-Mejid, and allowed him to maintain control
over the Ottoman Empire.

According to the Treaty of London that was then negotiated, Muhammad Ali
agreed to limit his army to 18,000 troops and to relinquish his Syrian
conquests. In return, he was declared ruler of Egypt for life, and his
rule was extended to his heirs, giving them a unique status within the
Ottoman realm. During the 1840s Muhammad Ali consolidated many of his
innovations before beginning to show signs of age-related cognitive
deterioration. He was removed as
wali
in 1848, died in Alexandria on August 2, 1849, and was buried in the
magnificent Muhammad Ali mosque that remains a Cairo landmark today.

Books

Fahmy, Khaled,
All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of
Modern Egypt
, American University in Cairo Press, 1997.

Fahmy, Khaled, "The Era of Muhammad Ali Pasha,
1805–1848,"
The Cambridge History of Egypt
, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Hourani, Albert,
A History of the Arab Peoples
, Faber and Faber, 2002.